Enfants du Mékong

Enfants du Mékong, is a French NGO which, since 1958, has been allowing poor children to reclaim their dignity through access to education and employment.

Our Goal: To educate, train, support and professionally integrate children and young people, enabling them to improve their material living conditions and to develop intellectually, emotionally, and morally.

There are almost 22,000 children receiving sponsorship and 60,000 receiving support, enabling them to access education. Children of the Mekong supports the construction of some 100 development projects (schools, wells, etc.) every year and runs 10 education centres and 78 foster houses.

60 international VSI volunteers, known as Bambous, are sent out into the field on assignments for at least one year at a time to support various projects carried out by the NGO.

Children of the Mekong is active in 7 countries: Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, Cambodia, Burma and China.

The Doctor Christophe Mérieux Centre:

Welcoming young people in this centre and shelter has now become one of the key strategic priorities for the work of the EDM. In specific terms, this centre is home to supplementary lessons and activities and the shelter provides accommodation.

From a human and educational perspective, the success of these experiences is clear to see: a child or young person who has attended an EDM centre will not only have better academic results but also be much more open, well-rounded, and motivated. The ideal setting in which to put our educational plan into action, it offers a whole range of supplementary lessons and activities (academic support, preparation for working life, human formation, and extra-curricular activities).

The Doctor Christophe Mérieux Centre was inaugurated in 2010. It has space for 160 pupils.

The centre’s educational approach seeks to makes its pupils into “true leaders”, balanced, happy people who are able to engage with a project, take their responsibility for it and boost those around them. Our educational approach develops the three core ingredients of a true leader: character, conviction and competence.

“I want to tell all young people living in poverty that efforts can overcome obstacles, but to do so they have to engage, persevere, and tackle ignorance. We are born into poverty, we can’t do anything about it, but poverty isn’t a foregone conclusion, education can lift us out of it and give us dignity”. Laumang Seng, a supported student at the Doctor Christophe Mérieux Centre.